The Coffin Maker
by lostlikeme
Summary: A mysterious coffin maker offers Will an up close look at the wares. Prequel to "Blood Mendicant"


Grief stricken is one of Hannibal's favorite flavors. Like a fine wine, the soul becomes ripe with age; a complex fermentation of trauma and unfulfilled desires. He's been watching this particular gentleman shuffle around the coffins for a while now, running his fingertips thoughtfully along the wood. He has dark curls and wears a pair of spectacles to hide the red rims of his eyes. Hannibal can smell the sweat soaking through his shirt collar from here.

"Hi," he mutters, shuffling by with his hands in his pockets. "I'm Will."

It's hardly half an introduction but Hannibal lets it slide, if only because Will manages to make mumbling look graceful, like a painting hung sideways to force a shift in perspective. He pulls one hand from his pocket to check the time, and forgets it while reorienting his watch. His mind is whirring so fast that at first, Hannibal has great difficulty reading it.

"Glad to meet you," Hannibal says, trying to decipher death from self-destruction. "I get the sense that you're looking for something special."

Will's gaze flickers to Hannibal before bouncing back to the floor, unsettled. There's a rug from India under his cheap loafers that he keeps returning to, unable to move past the little spot where the red dye eked into the colorless fringe. He clasps his hands tightly together, heartbeat like a trapped hummingbird betwixt his cupped palms.

"Just something for...a friend."

Much more than a friend, Hannibal thinks, filling the pause with everything Will doesn't say out loud. Someone important. Will pretends to look at a painting just to avoid further conversation, brain as blank as an untouched canvas.

The caskets for children are further back, hidden out of sight in the back room. Will finds his way there anyway, frozen before one of Hannibal's favorites, a bone ivory oak with a teddy carefully carved into the front. He pauses beside it, like he can feel the emotions Hannibal left there, patiently sanding it and waiting for the finish to dry by the light of a blue moon.

"That would be my sister's." Will jumps at the sound of his voice. "Or, would have been. Her name was Mischa." Will doesn't inquire for more, so Hannibal forages on ahead. "We never recovered her body."

Will nods, adam's apple bobbing like a cast fishing line. It dips when their attention shifts for a moment, to a moth beating it's wings against the lampshade, creating shadows on the ceiling in the shape of monsters.

"So she never got a proper burial."

Hannibal isn't used to feeling so transparent. "Correct."

It's poetry, the two of them standing this close without touching. Will is all but giving himself away, and the very life flowing through his veins only draws Hannibal closer, like an unfolded rose before a wasp. He counts the pores on Will's cheek, busies himself cataloguing the follicles on his arms, the freckles, the scars peaking out from under his rolled shirtsleeves.

"And this one?"

Hannibal stiffens - he's led them to the enemy after all, accidentally on purpose - the unglazed death trap, pitch black. Just a little taller than Will, with the same plush guts of a rose, pinned behind stained glass. A luxury to end up dead in that most will never afford. The shiny silver clasp gleams under Will's thumb.

"It's not for sale."

"Why's that?"

"It's incomplete."

That much is obvious, even to Will, yet he asked anyway. The audacity is a splash of hot acid. Hannibal is struck by how much the beast suits him. Unsanded and unfinished, like the ungroomed hair on his face. He wants to take a blade to it, teach Will the right way to get a good clean shave before he heaves his last shuddering breath.

"Why don't you try it out?"

"Excuse me?" Will rubs his hands together, gaze hidden behind scratched lenses and a flimsy plastic frame. "You're not serious."

Will looks in his direction without making eye contact, staring through him or over his shoulder, or both. He cannot see the impression of his own face in Will's mind, and the revelation both offends and excites him. Hannibal laughs, afflicted by the urge to see him in a proper coat.

"Afraid you'll be buried alive?"

"Yeah, actually."

The honesty fills him with affection. There is no elaboration that follows, but Hannibal knows what he's thinking, making it all that much easier to prod him forward with the right words.

"Were you always frightened of dying, or did it dawn on you in light of recent events?"

Knowing the answer isn't enough, Hannibal needs to hear him speak the truth out loud. He wants to deliver Will from his own fragile mortality, but he also wants to preserve it, dip it in formaldehyde and serve it.

"My uncle told me this story when I was a little kid. He told me about when his grandfather died. It was the first funeral he ever went to, open casket. Everyone in the family went up to say their piece, kiss his cheek, and say goodbye. Two days later and the police are still receiving reports of screaming - coming from the cemetery at night." Will takes a deep, trembling breath. "By the time they dug him back up it was too late, and he'd died of suffocation."

Hannibal doesn't let the moment sit, it's too delicate. "I know that story well."

"You do?"

"As does everyone between here and France, I would assume." Hannibal keeps a straight face for Will's benefit. "It's just an old wives tale, a story to give children a healthy fear of death." He touches the corner of Will's ill fitting blazer, breathing in the blood red life of him. "A small wonder the mortician, nor the embalmer noticed anything awry."

"I feel stupid." Will rasps out something like laughter. "I always thought if I had to pick out one of these, it would be for myself."

Hannibal leans over Will's shoulder when he bends to feel the cushion stitched inside. He cradles an arm around his middle and they move not unlike a dance. Will spins in Hannibal's grip and tries to push him away, but Hannibal presses him closer by sheer force, unforgiving as stone. Will smells like an evergreen forest toward the tail end of winter. A pond frozen over, just beginning to thaw.

There's no struggle.

He punctures the skin on Will's neck as easily as one might a peach, moving slowly, brushing his lips across Will's throat, searching for the spot where his heart beats the hardest. He scrapes his canines over the map of veins before closing his jaw, relishing in the feeling of fruit giving way to the sweet juice inside.

Will melts into the touch, fusing their shirts together. His shaking hands twist a knot in the fabric, knuckles knocking into the small of Hannibal's back. There's heat radiating from Will's chest but he's chill to the touch, feverish and clammy. His chapped lips part beside Hannibal's ear, but he doesn't speak.

There are no words, but the blood carries a flood of memories. Impressions of love, anguish, and a lost youth. In a few short moments Hannibal knows he will be nostalgic for the way Will was alive, the way he was aging - but for right now he has him, limp as a chinadoll in a child's arms. He lowers Will into the box while he's still delirious, weak from shock.

"You're a nightwalker," Will manages breathlessly, brow sweaty. He tries to reach out but he's too disoriented. "A monster."

The revelation isn't what it should be. Hannibal knows his skin is unnaturally pale even in the dim light, and that his eyes shine like red jewels under the glare from the sun. The moth trapped behind the lampshade knocks into the lightbulb and stills.

"And you're too smart, I'm afraid."

Will winces when he snorts. "You don't look scared to me."

The joke falls flat but the corner of Hannibal's mouth twitches. It's been well over a century since anything from a mortal has evoked such amusement. What a pity, that the life is already ebbing out of him, pulling the color from his cheeks. Hannibal closes the heavy lid of the coffin, fingers the lock, and leans against it.

"You're brave for coming in here by yourself with a fear like that. It happens more often than anyone would like to believe." Hannibal listens to his shallow breathing, the drip of his wound leaking. "I'd drug you first, but it wouldn't be difficult. With the right dose I could slow your heart to a stop. I used to be a doctor, you know."

"Congratulations?"

Will has already crawled through Hell and come out alive. Eternity doesn't frighten him the way it used to. Still, Hannibal hears him shuffling, senses the brief spike of panic when he pushes against the lid but it doesn't budge. How interesting to see fight and flight, working together, banishing grief beyond the horizon line.

"Think of how it would feel," Hannibal continues, "to awaken cold and uncomfortable, in a cramped, alien space."

"This is actually more comfortable than my bed." He rotates his ankles. "Roomy."

The nonchalance isn't all that forced. Hannibal is still waiting for the fear to surface, the paralyzing existential terror every living fleck feels at the end of their infinitesimal lifespan. Even people who are ready to die beg to live at the tail end of it all. Will this one be the exception?

"Only to realize you're already in your coffin." Hannibal can feel the heat in his own veins like he produced it himself. "You've been buried alive."

"No," Will says, and then, less sure. "They'd hear me screaming."

"Perhaps, but not for long." Hannibal chuckles, a dark, terrible rumble that climbs from barrel of his ribs. "At this rate you'd use up all the oxygen before you got that far."

He can smell the perspiration, the pit stains, the precise moment Will licks his lips. Movement ceases and the room is instantly quiet. The silence stretches on for so long that Hannibal wonders if he was too rough in his enthusiasm and Will has already bled out into the upholstery.

"Worried I'll scuff up the sloppy craftsmanship?" Will shouts, jiggling the lid with a well intentioned kick. "Did you carve the details with your eyes closed?"

Hannibal rips open the coffin so hard the lid flies off the hinges. Wood splits, fraying the flesh colored pulp inside, noise swallowing the space. He tears Will from the interior with a jerky, lurching movement, splattering chrysanthemum red across the alabaster in a leaky lace frill, alive as icing on a hot pastry.

"You've made a mess of a very expensive piece."

Will's head lolls and he speaks half over his own shoulder. "It wasn't even finished."

"How rude."

Will lifts his head with some success, taking the posture of a crow with a broken wing. Sue him for being sentimental, for craving a show.

"If I'm rude, then we have a different perspective on manners."

Undefeated never colors him, triumphant even as the life force leaks out. He should be wondering if Hannibal is going to kill him by now, but he's trying to remember what he had for dinner last night, or if he had anything for dinner at all.

"Since you can't afford to fix it." Hannibal tightens his fist, yanking him closer. "Why don't you pay me with something else?"

"My life?"

Will has been waiting to die for weeks, and Hannibal isn't just going to take him there, he's going to deliver him, streaking through the gates of hell. He'll lay with him hereafter, in this splinter infested abomination of a coffin. He smiles against the crook of Will's neck.

"Your soul."


End file.
